I’ve been working with Ange Leccia as a composer and producer for twelve years now. Sometimes it’s a phone call, both friendly and brief, during which he outlines a new project. Sometimes it’s a simple, laconic text message: can you do a soundtrack for me? I’ve never said no. Sometimes I work with edited images, other times, on the contrary, I have nothing or very little to look at, just a few seconds of rushes, a few still shots. In these cases, it’s up to the soundtrack to guide the film script. Our collaborations are frequent but never the same. This playful dimension has always appealed to me. Each time, I have to experiment and build on what I know about his imagination. When I feel the need to do so, I call him. I listen to Ange and the vague clues he relays to me. I listen to him tell an anecdote, describe a scene, a setting, a gesture, a glimmer, a flicker, and I try to grasp what, in his words, reappears. Words and ideas that return like waves. ‘Something that dies and is reborn’, he tells me, this time on the phone, about the soundtrack I’m to produce with very little information. Three days later, he writes the following message: I like the treatment of the sound, it slips away, disappears and is reborn from its ashes. Ange loves backward flow, the backward flow of the sea, the backward flow of memories.

Slow-motion, non-violent backward flow that comes and goes, from overexposure to half-light, slowly, dreamily. His images have a hypnotic, suspended charm, like the persistence of distant emotions, extended into an endless summer, threatened by oblivion, like a vicious current, but one which never manages to carry them out to sea. His images attract the noise, the sound, the suggestive power of a song; they call out to it, like inviting a partner to dance. His images, even the silent ones, are musical. They sway. They hum. They ripple. Slow. Time prolongs so that the memory can make its nest. A memory of perfume, of fading light, of a floor that slips beneath your footsteps, of the brush of a cheek, of an arm rounded like a loop around your neck. Then, the next moment, the next day, the next century, the solitude, the fundamental solitude of everyone before these images. A close-up of a teenage face, a camera gaze with drawn-out blinks. A recurring motif in his films. A moment of silent tension, of incommunicable interiority, during which all love songs sparkle, during which all love songs fade away. ‘I filmed these images in the summer of 1999’, he tells me, when he finally shows them to me. Slow. Like their ascent from the depths of a transistor abandoned nonchalantly on a beach towel. Images with a strange power, which scrutinise us, embrace us, welcome us into the languor of a dreamed memory. And then, suddenly, we remember: that evening, none of us had managed to say I love you, and the last summer of the twentieth century was almost over.

Julien Perez

Translated by Sadie Fletcher